Desmond Travers: ‘tenor of the Goldstone Report in its entirety stands’

Earlier today we picked up a report that Hina Jilani, a Pakistani lawyer and one of four members of the UN Factfinding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, said that Judge Richard Goldstone’s reconsideration of the report does not change her support for its conclusions. Well now the AP reports that Desmond Travers, also a member of the Mission, stands by the findings:

Goldstone’s decision to reconsider the conclusions of the report came as a surprise to at least one other member of the four-person panel that authored the document.

“I probably didn’t expect to see the comments he made, to be honest,” Desmond Travers told the AP in a telephone interview,” adding he had not been consulted beforehand.

Travers, a former officer in the Irish Armed Forces and an expert on international criminal investigations, said he hadn’t seen the Israeli investigative reports that prompted Goldstone to backtrack on parts of his conclusion, though he acknowledged it might be valid to do so.

“But the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands,” Travers said.

And here is Cedric Sapey, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Council, also standing up for the report, from the same piece:

“UN reports are not canceled on the basis of an op-ed in a newspaper,” spokesman Cedric Sapey told The Associated Press.

“Various resolutions passed by the Geneva-based council and the UN General Assembly in New York would also have to be repealed by those bodies,” he said.

8 Responses

So Goldstone fired off his WaPo editorial without even consulting his three co-authors of the original report?

Completely unprofessional — the rough equivalent of a U.S. Supreme Court justice attempting to reverse his deciding vote in a 5-4 decision by publishing an editorial in the WaPo — a gesture of zero legal significance, but of near-infinite indignity for the individual and the court.

Goldstone’s behavior — his shocking deviation from a high standard of professional conduct established over a lifelong career — borders on bizarre. It appears that he’s either been scared witless by threats, or else is suffering from a psychological disturbance.

Abandoning all pretense of collegiality and not even consulting his colleagues before issuing a radical challenge to a jointly-authored report suggests that the man is in personal crisis. He would not have been selected to participate in the first place if he were prone to such erratic behavior. Something is badly wrong here.

The twisted logic behind the Israeli demand to repeal is that this was certainly one of the most violent attacks on the Palestinians, and if this is dismissed everything that went before which did less harm is supposedly worthy of dismissal. It is right up there with “because we suffered the Holocaust we can do what we like to anyone else and it will be excused (which has become the new Zionist religion),” it is reinforced by paying no price for such atrocities.

These are the thought processes that go with impunity, which grows from unchecked privilege and will become rampant if embraced by a society as a relative whole. Unfortunately I do not see any relief, and that is because the behavior is absorbed into the dominant global process. However, I might be wrong but I doubt it – we can wait and see, or we can take the correct view and course to facilitate true change.

Is it possible that he was threatened (sexual pics with someone other than his wife for instance, like in the movies)? Raw, extreme pressures?

Anyway doesn’t that show that a Jewish person should never have been chosen to do the job? If tribal pressures can lead him to cave in afterwards and can be as nasty as can he be there for the religious rite of his grand child?

I can only imagine the reactions if a Palestinian from the diaspora had been leading this effort. How come this dude ended up there in the first place?

I would say it shows that a Zionist Jew should never have been chosen for the job. They just can’t sustain the appropriate level of honesty and integrity. There are plenty of Jewish people, though, who aren’t total sell-outs and fanatics like Goldstone.

I’m not saying no Jews were able to do this job honestly. Far from that. I’m just saying that given the context of the inquiry, not choosing either a Jewish person or a Palestinian person from the diaspora seemed a self evident move.

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